Finding different voices

In an OLDaily post this week, Stephen Downes has encouraged the authors of a recent publication ‘Open at the Margins’ to redouble their efforts to find the voices not being heard. I interpret this as a call by Stephen for greater diversity in the people who are being recognised as speaking for open education. I think all groups could and should aspire to this.

I’m not sure how I would go about finding voices not being heard. Perhaps it’s a question of being aware of the direction of our attention, and that what we choose to attend to determines not only what we see, but also what we don’t see. Rather than trying to find voices not being heard it might be easier to find different voices; this might require a cross or multi-disciplinary approach to seek different perspectives, which may or may not include minority voices.

On reflection I realise that I have spent most of this year seeking and listening to different voices. A positive outcome of the Covid-19 pandemic for me (and I realise how privileged I am to be in this position) has been to discover a wide range of different people who have made their work and thoughts available online (either freely or at minimum cost). Many organisations have supported this opening up of access to different voices. These are some that I have found interesting and enjoyed over the past few months, offering me new avenues for thought and/or exploration.

Channel McGilchrist

This is a new platform, which I joined in June. Membership requires paying a fee, but there is also access to some materials for non-paying members. Since Iain McGilchrist is a polymath, which is very evident from his book, The Master and His Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, this channel has attracted a wide diversity of thinkers from different disciplines, which has generated very varied discussion. Lots of different voices here.

The London School of Economics and Political Science

• 04-06-20 Do Morals Matter: presidents and foreign policy from FDR to Trump
• 22-06-20 Brexit and the Post-Covid-19 options for the economy

Being Human Festival of Humanities

• 12-05-20 Being Human in Conversation. On Politics and Plagues
• 24-06-20 Being Human in Conversation with David Lammy. My Education

How to Academy

• 30-06-20 Peter Singer in Conversation with Matthew Stadlen
• 15-07-20 Iain McGilchrist. The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning
• 06-08-20 An evening with Slavoy Zizek. In conversation with Rowland Smith

I’m looking forward to:

• 02-09-20 The Anarchy – The Relentless Rise of the East India Company with William Dalrymple
• 13-09-20 John Cleese’s Guide to Creativity

The Weekend University

• 26-07-20 A Day on Psychology and Culture

Philosophy of Education Reading Network on Twitter @PhilofEd

• 18-08-20 Discussion of Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good

I’m looking forward to next month’s meeting of the network:

• 15-09-20 Discussion of Gert Biesta’s The Beautiful Risk of Education

I have only just discovered (by chance, and most of these events/groups were discovered by chance) the Philosophy of Education Reading Network. Last night’s discussion was the first for this newly established group and was open to anyone. A few people in the zoom call clearly knew each other, but many, like me, were new to the network, and some were new to the philosophy of education. 17 people attended, a good mix of men and women, and of different ages, and the atmosphere was very inclusive without putting pressure on people to contribute. All contributions were welcomed and considered.

Returning to the point made at the beginning of this post about the need to encourage different voices to contribute to a group or collaborative endeavour, and in the light of my experience last night of a newly formed group, I wonder at what point does it become difficult for a group to recognise that some voices are not heard, or that critical perspectives are being narrowed and limited through group think and a lack of diversity? Is it inevitable that this happens in groups that share and enjoy a common interest?

This has reminded me of Stephen Downes work in 2007 on the difference between groups and networks, and his post Groups Vs Networks:The Class Struggle Continues, which I think speaks for itself and speaks to this topic of finding different voices.

Source of image:   https://www.flickr.com/photos/stephen_downes/252157734/

The Materiality of Nothing

This was an interdisciplinary symposium, held at Lancaster University, UK, about the immaterial/intangible, which aimed to bring together people with different perspectives to negotiate the imperceptible.

The seminar was introduced by Dr Sarah Casey – Lecturer in the Lancaster (University) Institute for the Contemporary Arts but also an artist who explores the limits of visibility and material existence.

Sarah Casey Murmur #3 – http://www.axisweb.org/p/sarahcasey/ 

Sarah asked us why we should consider the materiality of nothing, answering her own question by saying that ‘no’ thing implies the lack of ‘some’ thing and suggested that we tend to step around the intangible rather than try and deal with it directly, as exemplified by the Romans who didn’t have a zero in their numerals.

But as Sarah told us invisibility and immateriality are different. On reflection I would have liked a bit more discussion about this. On her website she asks  “at what point does visibility disappear and drawing become immaterial?”

In her introduction Sarah asked us to consider how we create something out of nothing and used erased drawings as an example of work that focuses on space and absence. With just a little research I can see that this topic has exercised a number of artists. For example Robert Rauschenberg explored the extent to which art could be created by removing marks rather than making them (see Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953) and a number of other artists have explored invisibility and aesthetic absence. Interestingly, during the day, as we listened to presentations I sat next to artist Gerry Davies who was almost continuously drawing in a small notebook. I was intrigued by how he used the rubber on the end of his pencil as much as the graphite, creating and removing marks in equal measure.

Sarah suggested that we need absence and space for imagination, interpretation and reflection. I found just this 10 minute introduction to the day fascinating and am grateful that Sarah and Lancaster University opened this seminar to the public.

There were many stimulating ideas to come out of the day, which I hope to find time to record in at least one future blog post. Although my understanding of much of what was talked about is very limited, I am intrigued by all the ways in which we can align ideas such as invisibility, absence, silence, immaterial, emptiness, speculative, contingency, indeterminacy, invisibility and nothing, to teaching and learning, particularly teaching and learning in the online environment where it is so easy to be invisible to each other. This has often been seen as a negative aspect of online learning, but maybe this is a short-sighted view.

For those who are interested in the programme for the day – here it is.

The Materiality of Nothing Programme 14th July

Questions about online ‘openness’

Source of image

• What motivates academics and teachers to get involved in areas of practice that are NOT supported by their institutions?

• Why invest even longer hours in supporting educational practice? My dentist doesn’t give me free root canal treatment outside of work?

• Why personally finance conference attendance and travel, and what are the implications of this for the education sector?

• What is in it for those willing to ‘go open’?

These are interesting and pertinent questions from Viv Rolfe in the wake of her attendance at the Association for Learning Technology Conference this year. They prompted me to look back in this blog to see what I have written about openness in education and going open. I am surprised at just how many posts relate to this topic; this has been one of my main areas of interest since 2008 and before.

I can remember clearly the point at which I realised I was ‘in the open’. It was during CCK08 – the MOOC which coined the term MOOC and was convened by Stephen Downes and George Siemens. I started this blog for that MOOC and about a month later made a post in which I questioned the need to be online to be connected. At the time, because I was new to blogging, I thought I was fairly anonymous and invisible and it gave me a tremendous jolt when I saw that Stephen Downes had included this post in his blog aggregation. Since then I have often considered (for example in this blog post) how open I am or want to be, because the feeling of over exposure and discomfort has never completely gone away.

So as Viv asks – Why do I do it? For me Viv’s first question is easy to answer.

• What motivates academics and teachers to get involved in areas of practice that are NOT supported by their institutions?

I work independently of an institution, and have done for 10 years, so any support that I do have comes from my network. The big question for me is ‘who do I want to be in my network?’ I am not interested in collecting numbers for the sake of it. When I get a friend request on Facebook, or a connection request on LinkedIn, or a follower on Twitter, I don’t automatically connect. If I don’t know the person or ‘of ‘ the person, I look them up (Google them etc.). If I think we have topics of interest in common, then I will connect. I am not looking for social connections, but for professional connections. Sometimes these overlap, but I don’t assume that they will or even want them to. I have found the increasing blurring between public and private, personal and professional, troubling and constantly find myself wavering about what the difference is. I use ‘open’ social media as an information source. If and when I share information online, it is in the hope that it will be useful to others – but I am never sure of whether it will be and whether it is a conceit to be sharing in this way. I am thinking this as I write this post.

Then Viv asks:

• Why invest even longer hours in supporting educational practice? My dentist doesn’t give me free root canal treatment outside of work?

Again for me this is fairly straight-forward to answer. In my career I can’t remember ever sticking to the statutory hours. I have always done more hours and sometimes many, many more hours than in my contract. There have been various reasons for this, but I think the main reasons have been to do with wanting to learn more and to do a better job – not for any recognition, although it is great when this happens, but simply because that’s what I find fulfilling. Currently most of my work is voluntary, unpaid research, which I hope in some small way supports educational practice. I am committed to publishing in ‘open’ journals, although this isn’t necessarily what all my research collaborators want or need for their career advancement, so it doesn’t always work that way. Collaboration usually does involve some degree of compromise 🙂 and I value openness between friends and collaborators, far more than openness in the online network.

Viv’s next question was:

• Why personally finance conference attendance and travel, and what are the implications of this for the education sector?

I have been doing this for the past 10 years. I try to physically attend one conference a year but I have to weigh up costs against gains. Sometimes it is interesting to meet people face-to-face, but I am looking much more for something that stimulates my thinking and sets me off in new directions. There is something about being physically present that can be much more powerful than attending virtually. For many people a conference is about networking and meeting people. For me, when I am paying for myself, that is a luxury. I need more than that. I need to be able to come away and feel that my thinking has changed in some way – and I need to know that I have invested my time and money wisely and that the costs will pay dividends in terms of my future work. What are the implications for the education sector? I think that in the years to come there will be many, many older people, like me, who are already drawing their pensions, who will want to attend conferences and contribute to presentations. Hopefully conference organisers will see these contributions as welcome, but also realise that current costs are often prohibitive. And it is usually the case that people who are paying for themselves can have higher expectations and be more demanding of processes 🙂 This could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on whose perspective you are taking!

Viv’s last question is the key one.

• What is in it for those willing to ‘go open’?

I would describe my practice as one of ‘guarded openness’. I haven’t thrown myself out there and revealed all, as I see some people doing. I find it disturbing when people seem to ‘wash their dirty linen’ in the open. Some things are not meant to be discussed in the open, but should be reserved for private communication between the parties concerned. I also find that group think, constant self-affirmation and self-validation, either individually or as a group, that fails to stand back and look critically at this online behaviour, makes me feel equally uncomfortable. In the past year I have seen so much of these behaviours online. When I joined CCK08, I was really excited by the altruistic sharing of knowledge and learning behind the idea of ‘openness’, but recently it has seemed to me to be more about narcissism than altruism – about getting noticed and building up ‘numbers’ of followers, tweets etc.

So why am I still here? To be honest, I am no longer sure, but I am hanging on to Stephen Downes’ and George Siemens’ original and hopefully ongoing aspirations for open education. And I am not expecting any response to this post because what I have learned in the last year is that the internet favours consensus and punishes dissent. I should have paid more attention when Dave Snowden told us this in the Change 11 MOOC – another MOOC organised by Stephen Downes and George Siemens.

Gardening in open learning environments

I spent most of yesterday in my garden, thinking about plants and how what I was doing in my garden might relate to my understanding of teaching and learning in open learning environments.

We have a large garden – ¾ of an acre. Over the years we have tried to organise the garden so that it is manageable. There is no way I can keep on top of it, even with help, and to be honest, much as I love my garden, and in particular the privacy it affords, gardening is not my first priority. The garden is too big for me to know what is going on everywhere and too big for me to manage all the plants. This is what one part of the garden looks like at the moment.

Today I thought I would split some of the perennial plants and move them to fill up other gaps in the garden – such as the red and pink border plant (polygonum affine) you can see in the photo. But instead I found I spent my time thinking about dominant plants and how to deal with them, particularly Aquilegia, a deceivingly delicate, informal, pretty plant.

 Source of image

This year it has been all over our garden. I don’t remember ever planting Aquilegia in the 30+ years we have been living here. It seeds itself and pops up everywhere. But the problem is that it then, with its bushy leaf growth smothers every smaller plant around it and can crowd out even slightly larger plants. In other words it dominates and because it propagates itself, it is very easy, if you are not paying attention to your garden, to lose some lovely plants which it sits on top of. Aquilegia is the type of plant that is difficult to contain. It is everywhere. It is too much ‘in your face’! I spent much of yesterday either digging it up or moving other plants away from it.

The other plant I had to think about yesterday was Ground Elder. This is another plant which is everywhere is my garden. It is the worst kind of rhizome. What I really dislike about this plant, apart from the fact that it is almost impossible to eradicate, is that it springs up in the middle of another plant where it is definitely not wanted. This year I have had to constantly pick it out of the middle of my Hostas. To remove it completely from the Hostas, I would have to dig them up too.

Some plants seem to manage to seed themselves (or the birds seed them) and then grow into a self-contained shrub without causing too much bother to the other plants around them. An example of this that I really like in my garden and which is looking particularly lovely at this time of year is ‘sweet amber’ (hypericum androsaemum).

This plant is no trouble so long as you leave its berries alone, which are poisonous. If my children were still young I would be thinking seriously about digging it up too.

And then there are the trees. We have a number of large trees in our garden, such as beech and sycamore, which as they grow can create too much shade for other plants to thrive, but for me, they are much easier to manage than the Aquilegias and the Ground Elder. The trees seed themselves too, but it takes a long time for the seeds to get established, long enough to ‘nip them in the bud’.

So yesterday, whilst gardening I was thinking about the various approaches I could take to ensure that my garden thrives.

I could take a ‘hands off’ approach and leave it all to nature – let the self-seeding plants, rhizomes and trees dominate, take over and ultimately cause the death of many other plants. I’m sure the garden would survive, but what kind of garden would it be and what would happen to the diversity of plants? I’m not sure how attractive or interesting the garden would be as a result of this approach.

Or I could spend every waking hour, which is what I think it would take, to make sure every plant is growing exactly where I want it to, when I want it to. I think there is a lot to lose from taking this approach. First it would be a constant battle – nature has to be wooed rather than fought. And then there would be the loss of all those lovely unexpected surprises that a garden can bring.

But I think the only answer for me is somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. If I took a ‘hands off’ approach I would question why have a garden at all, when I only have to walk into the nearby countryside to experience the results of letting nature take over. Taking a super-managed approach wouldn’t work for me either. I think it would quickly become boring. I want my garden to be a pleasure, not a chore, but I also want it and the plants in it to survive and thrive. To ensure that they do, I can’t allow a free for all in my garden. It does require some management. In particular I feel that it is my responsibility to manage those dominant, self-seeding plants and rhizomes, otherwise I might as well not have a garden at all.

Of course, the little I did in my garden yesterday is far from the whole picture when it comes to creating a beautiful garden. Nurturing plants so that they show us their full potential requires knowledge and expertise. It’s related to getting the balance right between structure and agency which I wrote about in my last post. A garden near us that seems to have really achieved this is Gresgarth Hall Gardens.  There’s a lot to learn from this beautiful garden.

We only have to compare the photo of my garden with the photo of Arabella Lennox-Boyd’s garden, to see that there’s more to gardening than just management.

Access to open teaching and learning

This week I have been reminded that I cannot assume that everyone working in education will have online access as and when they want it.

I live in a beautiful part of the UK – Southern Cumbria – a county filled with mountains and lakes and lushly green because of all the rain we get. I have never had any significant problems with getting an internet connection. Sometimes it has been slow and sometimes I have dropped out when making synchronous connections such as in a Google Hangout, but this has been minimal and has not interfered with my ability to work. This week even these minor difficulties have been removed as I now have a high speed fibre broadband connection for the first time and I can already see the difference.

British Telecom claimed a year ago that half of Cumbria was covered by faster, fibre broadband – but we have only just got it in our area in the South Lakes and many still don’t have it.

I only have to travel 20 minutes from my home, on the motorway going North, to get into a valley (this must be one of the most beautiful stretches of motorway in the country) where I lose signal. I know from my hill walking experience that it can be easier to get a signal on the top of a mountain than in the valleys.

Source of image

But few people in Cumbria will be living on mountain tops. The majority are living in the valleys, and many are living in remote rural areas.

Source of image

Eventually everyone will have high speed broadband, but in the meantime this has implications for anyone working online, for rural businesses and particularly for schools and for students in further and higher education and their teachers.

This came home forcefully to me this week when testing Google Hangout and appear.in with a couple of colleagues. This worked fine for me, but was virtually impossible for one of my colleagues whose online connection depends on tethering her phone to her computer. My other colleague pointed out that she could only join the Hangout from her work base, as at home in rural Cumbria, she doesn’t have a mobile signal and even her telephone line isn’t working. She is investigating satellite broadband, but it is expensive and for students probably wouldn’t be an option.

This is the reality for many students and educators in the area I live in, which adds another perspective to the meaning of open online learning and how it can be promoted.

The good news is that the county council claims that 93% of homes and businesses will have access to superfast broadband by the end of the year so hopefully this will increase the potential for open online learning.

Open teaching and learning

Source of image 

My work in July has been more face-to-face than I have been used to in recent years. This has been a pleasure and illuminating in many respects, and has caused me to reflect once again on the meaning of ‘openness’ in teaching and learning.

I have been supporting tutors in the development of modules for an online Masters programme to be delivered in Blackboard. In my last post, I wrote about some of my frustrations with Blackboard  and this hasn’t changed, but I realize that a lot of my frustrations result from having worked outside an LMS for the past 10+ years, i.e. out in the open. I am now used to working in the open; as such Blackboard feels very ‘closed’.

The tutors I am working with are, mostly, not used to working ‘in the open’, for example in Twitter or on personal blogs, such as this one. They are used to working within Blackboard, uploading resources and using some of the Blackboard tools, such as discussion forums and the Blackboard blogs.

The problem with an LMS is that it’s easy for the tutor to be invisible and for modules to become repositories for resources. We have been discussing how to increase tutor ‘presence’ in Blackboard by creating and posting videos, engaging in discussion forums, blogging, and engaging synchronously with students. Research has shown (for many years) that tutor ‘presence’ promotes student engagement online. Increasing this presence can be made easier by using tools outside Blackboard, in spaces such as Google Hangout, appear.in, Skype, Twitter and on a personal blog. (Thanks to my colleague Mariana Funes for pointing me to appear.in. I think this will be a very helpful tool).

But being ‘in the open’ raises security alarm bells for some tutors. What if their students post the less than perfect (in their eyes) videos they have made on Facebook? What if synchronous sessions with students, which are not intended to be viewed by anyone other than the student group involved, suddenly find their way onto the open web? What are the risks? Even creating ‘unlisted’ videos in YouTube is no guarantee that they won’t find their way on to the open web. A student might (with no intended malice) post the link in a public place.

I can sympathise and empathise with these tutors’ concerns. I have been on the end of online ‘unpleasantness’ when in the open, so I know how it feels and I know the threats that this can pose to my reputation as a consultant, tutor, researcher and scholar. I know what an ‘ugly’ place the open web can be. I know the risks of openness.

But I also know the values. I wouldn’t be where I am today, working with wonderful research collaborators, having access to a diverse range of people and online resources and constantly having access to stimulating learning opportunities, if I hadn’t been prepared to ‘put myself out there’, at least to some extent.

If I Google myself I find a whole host of sites where I am referenced. I do have an online presence. Occasionally I find things that make me cringe and that I wish weren’t there in the open. For example, like many of the tutors I am working with, I don’t like seeing myself on video; I do not think this is a personal strength – but whilst I might cringe, I am not ashamed. I don’t think I have done, and I hope I never will do, anything of which I am personally ashamed on the level of professional or personal integrity.

For me this is the bottom line. Of course we will all make mistakes when working online, just as we do face-to-face, but strangely being open online can serve to make us more responsible and accountable than we might be in other offline spaces. For example, years ago I used to regularly travel to another part of the country to run teacher in-service training sessions. I remember at the time finding this a relief. All my other work was teaching face-to-face in classrooms, where if I made a mistake one day, I had to face the same students the next day or week. For the in-service training in another part of the country, I knew I would never see those participants again, so I felt under less pressure, although of course I made the same efforts to avoid making mistakes as when working face-to-face.

You would think that working online would offer a similar level of distance and obscurity, but if you come out of a closed space such as Blackboard, the opposite is the case. In working online in the open, we leave a record of our activity for all the world to see, should anyone be interested. The benefit of this is that we become acutely aware of our responsibilities and accountability to our students. In this sense, openness could be seen as positive professional development, despite the risks.

I have written lots of posts about openness in the past, exploring the advantages and disadvantages (see for example search results for ‘open learning’ , ‘how open are you?’ and ‘openness’). Overall, I would always recommend that a tutor gives it a go, even if only in a small way to begin with.

What I haven’t quite sorted out in my own head is how we can ensure that students adopt the same levels of responsibility and accountability as their tutors, so that no-one needs to worry about what might be revealed in the open; that we have a shared understanding of what responsibility and accountability mean when working in the open.

Note

Someone who has been exploring these issues for years with her tutor team is Lisa Lane. Lisa voluntarily (i.e. beyond the remit of her job) runs an open Programme for Online Teaching and supports tutors in the development of their online teaching skills through the programme and sharing of an extensive bank of open resources.

Last year Lisa also invited bloggers from her own institution and outside to contribute a post which reflected their interest in and understanding of online learning. Many different perspectives were shared and these have now been collated into a booklet which Lisa will share with her faculty. This seems like another great way to promote open teaching and learning.

See – POTPedagogyFirstbook

The changing role of the online teacher

As I mentioned in my last post, I was recently invited by Lisa Lane  to write a blog post for her Programme for Online Teaching blog. For details about the programme see the website: Program for Online Teaching 

I am reblogging my post here, so if you have already seen it, there is no need to read any further!

 

Some big issues in online teaching

Pedagogy is often defined as the method and practice of teaching, but is that all it is? And what do we understand by teaching? What is a teacher’s role? These are questions that have always engaged educators, but with increasing numbers of learners taking online courses in the form of massive open online courses (MOOCs), teaching online has come into sharp focus again. In my recent reading of research into MOOCs, I have noted reports that there has not been enough focus on the role of the teacher in MOOCs and open online spaces (Liyanagunawardena et al., 2013).

Years ago when I first started to teach online, I came across a report that suggested that e-learning was the Trojan Horse through which there would be a renewed focus on teaching in Higher Education, as opposed to the then prevailing dominant focus on research. It was thought that teaching online would require a different approach, but what should that approach be? Two familiar and helpful frameworks immediately come to mind.

1. Garrison, Anderson and Archer’s Community of Inquiry Model (2000), which focuses on how to establish a social presence, a teaching presence and a cognitive presence in online teaching and learning.

Establishing a presence is obviously important when you are at a distance from your students. Over the years I have thought a lot about how to do this and have ultimately come to the conclusion that my ‘presence’ is not as important as ‘being present’. In other words, I have to ‘be there’ in the space, for and with my students. I have to know them and they me. Clearly MOOCs, with their large numbers of students, have challenged this belief, although some succeed, e.g. the Modern and Contemporary American Poetry MOOC, where teaching, social and cognitive presence have all been established by a team of teachers and assistants, who between them are consistently present.

2. Gilly Salmon’s 5 stage model for teaching and learning online (2000) which takes an e-learning moderator through a staged approach from online access, through online socialization and information exchange, towards knowledge construction and personal development in online learning.

I have worked with this model a lot, on many online courses. Gilly Salmon’s books provide lots of practical advice on how to engage students online. What I particularly like about this model is that it provides a structure in which it is possible for learners and teachers to establish a presence and ‘be present’ in an online space, but again, MOOCs have challenged this approach, although Gilly Salmon has run her own MOOC based on her model.

In both these frameworks the teacher’s role is significant to students’ learning in an online environment, but these frameworks were not designed with ‘massive’ numbers of students in mind. The teaching of large numbers of students in online courses, sometimes numbers in the thousands, has forced me to stop and re-evaluate what I understand by pedagogy and teaching. What is the bottom line? What aspects of teaching and pedagogy cannot be compromised?

The impact of MOOCS

The ‘massive’ numbers of students in some MOOCs has raised questions about whether teaching, as we have known it, is possible in these learning environments. In this technological age we have the means to automate the teaching process, so that we can reach ever-increasing numbers of students. We can provide students with videoed lectures, online readings and resources, discussion forums, automated assessments with automated feedback, and ‘Hey Presto’ the students can teach each other and the qualified teacher is redundant. We qualified teachers can go back to our offices and research this new mechanized approach to teaching and leave the students to manage their own learning and even learn from ‘Teacherbots’ i.e. a robot.

Is there a role for automated teachers?
Recently I listened (online) to Sian Bayne’s  very engaging inaugural professorial lecture, which was live streamed from Edinburgh University.  Sian is Professor of Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh, here in the UK. During this lecture, Sian spent some time talking about the work she and her team have been doing with Twitterbots, i.e. automated responses to students’ tweets. The use of a ‘bot’ in this way focuses the mind on the role of the teacher. The focus of Sian’s talk was on the question of what it means to be a good teacher within the context of digital education. Her argument was that we don’t have to choose between the human and non-human, the material and the social, technology or pedagogy. We should keep both and all in our sights. She pointed us to her University’s Online Teaching Manifesto, where one of the statements is that online teaching should not be downgraded into facilitation. Teaching is more than that. (Click on the image to enlarge it).

Sian and her Edinburgh colleagues’ interest in automated teaching resulted from teaching a MOOC (E-Learning and Digital Cultures – EDCMOOC), which enrolled 51000 students. This experience led them to experiment with Twitterbots. They have written that EDCMOOC was designed from a belief that contact is what drives good online education (Ross et al., 2014, p.62). This is the final statement of their Manifesto, but when it came to their MOOC teaching, they recognized how difficult this would be and the complexity of their role, and questioned what might be the limitations of their responsibility. They concluded that ‘All MOOC teachers, and researchers and commentators of the MOOC phenomenon, must seek a rich understanding of who, and what, they are in this new and challenging context’.

Most of us will not be required to teach student groups numbering in the thousands, but in my experience even the teaching of one child or one adult requires us to have a rich understanding of who and what we are as teachers. Even the teaching of one child or one adult can be a complex process, which requires us to carefully consider our responsibilities. For example, how do you teach a child with selective mutism? I have had this experience in my teaching career. It doesn’t take much imagination to relate this scenario to the adult learner who lurks and observes rather than visibly participate in an online course. In these situations teaching is more than ‘delivery’ of the curriculum. It is more than just a practice or a method. We, as teachers, are responsible for these learners and their progress.

The ethical question

Ultimately the Edinburgh team referred to Nel Noddings’ observation (Ross et al., 2014 p.7) that ‘As human beings we want to care and be cared for’ and that ‘The primary aim of all education must be the nurturance of the ethical ideal.’ (p.6). Consideration of this idea takes teaching beyond a definition of pedagogy as being just about the method and practice of teaching.

As Gert Biesta (2013, p.45) states in his paper ‘Giving Teaching Back to Education: Responding to the Disappearance of the Teacher’

…. for teachers to be able to teach they need to be able to make judgements about what is educationally desirable, and the fact that what is at stake in such judgements is the question of desirability, highlights that such judgements are not merely technical judgements—not merely judgements about the ‘how’ of teaching—but ultimately always normative judgements, that is judgements about the ‘why’ of teaching

So a question for teachers has to be ‘‘Why do we teach?” and by implication ‘What is our role?’

For Ron Barnett (2007) teaching is a lived pedagogical relationship. He recognizes that students are vulnerable and that the will to learn can be fragile. As teachers we know that our students may go through transformational changes as a result of their learning on our courses. Barnett (2007) writes that the teacher’s role is to support the student in hauling himself out of himself to come into a new space that he himself creates (p.36). This is a pedagogy of risk, which I have blogged about in the past.

As the Edinburgh team realized, we have responsibilities that involve caring for our students and we need to develop personal qualities such as respect and integrity in both us and them. This may be more difficult online when our students may be invisible to us and we to them. We need to ensure that everyone, including ourselves, can establish a presence online that leads to authentic learning and overcomes the fragility of the will to learn.

Gert Biesta (2013) has written that teaching is a gift. ‘….it is not within the power of the teacher to give this gift, but depends on the fragile interplay between the teacher and the student. (p.42). This confirms Barnett’s view, with which I agree, that teaching is a lived pedagogical relationship. Teachers should use all available tools to support learners as effectively as possible. Pedagogy is more than the method and practice of teaching and I doubt that teaching can ever be fully automated. As teachers, our professional ethics and duty of care should not be compromised.

References

Barnett, R. (2007). A will to learn. Being a student in an age of uncertainty. Open University Press

Biesta, G. (2013). Giving teaching back to education: Responding to the disappearance of the teacher. Phenomenology & Practice, 6(2), 35–49. Retrieved from https://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/pandpr/article/download/19860/15386

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education model. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105.

Liyanagunawardena, T. R., Adams, A. A., & Williams, S. A. (2013). MOOCs: a systematic study of the published literature 2008-2012. IRRODL, 14 (3), 202-227. Retrieved from: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1455

Noddings, N. (1984). Caring. A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. California: University of California Press.

Ross, J., Bayne, S., Macleod, H., & O’Shea, C. (2011). Manifesto for teaching online: The text. Retrieved from http://onlineteachingmanifesto.wordpress.com/the-text/

Ross, J., Sinclair, C., Knox, J., Bayne, S., & Macleod, H. (2014). Teacher Experiences and Academic Identity: The Missing Components of MOOC Pedagogy. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 10(1), 57–69.

Salmon, G. (2011). E-moderating: The key to teaching and learning online (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Update

Since writing this blog post Sian Bayne has published a paper about Teacherbots.

Bayne, S. (2015). Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching. Teaching in Higher Education, 20(4), 455–467. doi:10.1080/13562517.2015.1020783

Pedagogy First Blog

At the beginning of March I was contacted by Lisa Lane and invited to write a blog post for her Programme for Online Teaching Blog. As with everything Lisa does, this was very well thought through and organized. Here was what she wrote in her introduction:

The Pedagogy First! blog is taking over the main page at the Program for Online Teaching.

We are hoping that we will present the views of those at the vanguard of online teaching as a creative and dynamic process. Through a journalistic approach, we hope to inspire those teaching online, make them think, and give them the tools to develop their own online teaching style and materials. Let’s go till June and see what happens!

She set up a Googledoc with a list of suggested topics, attached to specific weeks and invited us to select one or something similar.

At the time I was thinking a lot about the role of the teacher in online open learning environments, so that’s what I wrote about and it was scheduled to be posted at the end of May and has been posted today .

I so admire Lisa for her unwavering dedication to online learning and to promoting this at MiraCosta College in Oceanside, California. Her open Programme for Online Teaching has been running since 2005 and, together with a number of colleagues and volunteers, she must have encouraged many, many teachers to explore the potential of online learning.

I think the next POT Cert class will probably start in September and run for about 12 weeks. In the meantime, what a great idea to keep people engaged, connected and interested, by setting up a multi-author blog. I’m not sure exactly how many blog posts there have been since the beginning of March, but probably about 20. You can find them all on the website

Thank you Lisa for inviting me to be one of the authors.

Jane Hart’s Top Ten Tools for 2014

Jane Hart has once again asked for people to vote on the top ten tools that they use when working online. She has been doing this annually since 2007. This is a helpful prompt for reflection on whether my use of technology has changed over the past year and if so why, and if not why. I am not very adventurous in adopting new tools. Technology doesn’t interest me enough to want to experiment with tools I am unlikely to find useful in my every day work. I can remember clearly being shown Second Life a few years ago and knowing that I would never want to spend time trying to learn how to use it, and now it isn’t mentioned very often, or not in my circles, so I don’t regret not engaging with it. I am not afraid of technology, even of Second Life, although I was in the very early days, when I remember that I even resisted having a computer at home. All that struggling to use BBC computers in primary school classrooms, way back in the 80s, really put me off to begin with. At that time I would never have thought I would end up working as an education consultant mostly online.

These days, these are the tools I use and what I use them for.

Personal, private communication

Email: I still use this a lot and for many things it is still my preferred mode of communication, although I recognize that this has become easier since I have been independent and no longer receive hundreds of institutional emails, which have been copied to everyone, like I used to in the old days. Email does not work though for discussion about research, because it’s difficult to keep track of the ongoing conversation and edits.

Pbworks Wiki: I use this a lot for collaborative research. I find it a fantastic tool for this. Not only can we keep all the resources and data in one place, but we can also discuss papers and ideas. I also use it for shared reading, e.g. to discuss a book. I spend a lot of time in my wikis and see that I now have 34 wikis in my list (not all currently active), most of them set up by me.

Skype: This is a great tool for personal communication and team meetings. And it’s free! I use Skype quite a lot. I prefer it for meetings. I have never liked the phone, so I don’t particularly want to Skype for ‘chat’.

iPhone: I am not of fan of phones and only use them when no other form of communication will do the trick. In the past few weeks I have spent what I consider to be an unreasonable number of hours changing my phone provider. I hate how difficult they make this.

Personal Resource Curation

Mendeley: This is where I collect all the research papers that I am interested in, read them and make notes on them. I really like that it is so easy to cite references from Mendeley. There are public groups in Mendeley and although I am a member of some, I do not really engage with them.

Evernote: I use this for making a note of interesting websites and online sources. It is easy to use and organise and complements the PDF/Word documents that I collect in Mendeley.

Feedly: This is where I gather RSS feeds to all the blogs I am interested in, but I am a slow reader (not good at skimming), so I don’t get to read as many as I would like to keep up with. I am more likely to read blog posts if they come into my email.

Flickr: This is semi public/private. I store nearly all my photos on Flickr, but I only allow some contacts to see photos of my family. I don’t like seeing photos of myself online, so I can empathise with others who might feel the same and don’t assume that everyone is happy to have their photo posted online. I tend to take photos as memories of places I have visited and found visually stimulating.

Kindle: I have just bought a Kindle PaperWhite. I love it. I already have a collection of books that I want to read – all in the palm of my hand – and it is sympathetic to my ever failing eyesight!

Public communication

WordPress: My blog is very important to me. It is a place where I publicly reflect on what I am thinking about in relation to my work. It helps me to do this reflection. I don’t very often use my blog for reflecting on more personal issues.

Facebook: I don’t really like Facebook very much, and as such don’t post there very often, but a lot of people that I like use it, so I tend to look at it most days to see what they are up to. I am a member of a few Facebook groups.

Twitter/Tweetdeck: I am also not a huge fan of Twitter, although I can see its advantages for sharing ideas. I find I have to trawl through a lot of ‘dross’ to find the gems. I like Tweetdeck for conferences. I find I can follow a conference very well online, at a distance, by creating a conference column in Tweetdeck.

Google+: I have an account, and I share my blog posts there, but it has never really resonated with me and I don’t really use it for anything else or follow it.

LinkedIn: I also share my blog posts on LinkedIn. My profile is actually a bit of a mess and I should do something about it, but I’m not sure what the benefits of LinkedIn are.

Blackboard Collaborate: This is not free for large numbers but it’s great for webinars, although Adobe Connect is also not bad these days. I have tried Big Blue Button in the past – but not recently. I could definitely find use for a reliable free tool that could host large numbers of participants for a webinar.

Presentations

Powerpoint: I’m not really a fan of this from the receiver point of view, but I haven’t yet really worked out why. I think it’s because presentations are necessarily more didactic than would be my choice. I still use it, but try to have as little text on slides as possible, although I know that this doesn’t help people who are listening to recordings.

Prezi: I have used this twice. For me it needs to be used judiciously for specific purposes.

Word: I use Word every day. I am now questioning whether Word is always used for presentation. I think it is – even if that presentation is only to myself. I am working in Word now, to write this post.

Camtasia: I use this for recording online presentations. I also use it for research purposes and when I am working on projects which require interviewing people.

Research

Survey Monkey: I have used this quite a lot. Going back to check, I see that to date I have created 23 surveys in Survey Monkey. I used to have a paid account (unlimited questions), but now I use the free account (up to 10 questions). I find it a really useful tool to get started on gathering empirical data. Email and Skype can be used for follow up.

Sharing

Dropbox: Apart from the tools I have mentioned above, I use Dropbox – for sharing large files, such as videos.

Excel: This remains a very good tool for gathering large amounts of data for analysis. For example, I used it extensively in a project where I was working with 21 Universities and synthesizing their work on a variety of funded projects.

Searching for information

Browser: I use Google Chrome. Before moving to Chrome, I used Internet Explorer and Firefox. I have had fewer problems with Chrome. But sometimes Chrome fails me and then I use Safari.

I also search for information through Google Search, Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Scholar and Google Translate.

I know I should use a variety of search engines. Perhaps this is what I need to work on for next year.

TOP TEN TOOLS

So which are my top ten tools? I know I use other tools as well as the ones I have mentioned here, such as Diigo, ScoopIt, JustGiving, Moodle and so on. This makes me wonder why I have focused on the tools above. On her site Jane Hart tells us ‘how’ to vote – but as far as I can see she doesn’t stipulate what ‘Top Ten’ means. Does it mean the number of times, or how often you use a tool? Does it mean how useful you find the tool? Does it mean how easy you find it to use the tool? Does it mean that it is free? And so on.

I’m going to select 10 based on the frequency with which I use them, either every day or at a minimum every week – and as such there are some important ones (to me) missing from this list. Here is my Top Ten, created according to this criterion.

1. Google Chrome (that’s where I start each day)
2. Email – Yahoo (that’s my next stop at the beginning of each day. I reply to emails as necessary and save them to my folders)
3. WordPress (I check comments and stats every day and might write a post, if I have something to say)
4. Facebook (I check what my friends/connections are doing, but find myself constantly asking why I am doing this. It feels a bit like voyeurism, since I rarely post in Facebook myself)
5. Tweetdeck (I scan the different columns for new posts which contain information which is relevant to my work. Occasionally I find something. I am very grateful to those who retweet my tweets)
6. Word (then I get down to it and start writing. Usually the writing gets copied into another site, e.g. PbWorks, or WordPress, or an email etc.)
7. Flickr (I usually have a backlog of photos that I want to edit and upload. I like to see what other Flickr contacts and users have posted. I am always so impressed by the openness and creativity of others)
8. Kindle (This is very recent. I read something every day on my Kindle PaperWhite. I can upload PDFs and comment on them and also upload a whole wishlist of books I hope to read. I read every night before sleeping. It used to be tangible hard copy books, but I find the Kindle easier. Will I be missing the hard copy books by this time next year?)
9. PbWorks (I don’t think a week goes by without adding to or commenting on text which has been uploaded to one of the wikis that I collaborate in. This is where I experience the most in depth discussions in my working life).
10. Evernote (This helps me to remember and store those weblinks that I often come across serendipitously and which I don’t have time to read in the moment).

I realize that this post is a bit like our work on Footprints of Emergence in which we (Roy Williams and I) create a visualization of an emergent learning experience in an open learning environment (See this open wiki for details).

In drawing these footprints we realize that the reflective process is dynamic and can change from instance to instance, so maybe if I were to list my top ten tools tomorrow they would be different. But this is my list for today and now.

Beyond Assessment – Recognizing Achievement in a Networked World

 

This was the third in a series of 3 talks that Stephen Downes gave in London this week.

Jul 11, 2014
Keynote presentation delivered to 12th ePortfolio, Open Badges and Identity Conference , University of Greenwich, Greenwich, UK.

ePortfolios and Open Badges are only the first wave in what will emerge as a wider network-based form of assessment that makes tests and reviews unnecessary. In this talk I discuss work being done in network-based automated competency development and recognition, the challenges it presents to traditional institutions, and the opportunities created for genuinely autonomous open learning.

For recordings of all three talks see OLDaily

Beyond Assessment – Recognizing Achievement in a Networked World
Jul 11, 2014. 12th ePortfolio, Open Badges and Identity Conference , University of Greenwich, Greenwich, UK (Keynote).

Beyond Institutions – Personal Learning in a Networked World
Jul 09, 2014. Network EDFE Seminar Series, London School of Economics (Keynote).

Beyond Free – Open Learning in a Networked World
Jul 08, 2014. 12th Annual Academic Practise & Technology Conference, University of Greenwich, Greenwich, UK (Keynote).

This was perhaps the most forward thinking and challenging of the three talks. I wasn’t at the talk, but listened to the recording. What follows is my interpretation of what Stephen had to say, but it was a long talk and I would expect others to take different things from it and interpret the ideas presented differently.

Educators have been wrestling with the issue of assessment, how to do it well, how to make it authentic, fair and meaningful, how to engage learners in the process and so on for many, many years.

Assessment has become even more of a concern since the advent of MOOCs and MOOC are symptomatic of the changes that are happening in learning. How do you assess thousands of learners in a MOOC?  The answer is that you don’t – or not in the way that we are all accustomed to – which is testing and measurement to award credentials such as degrees and other qualifications. This has resulted in many institutions experimenting with offering a host of alternative credentials in the form of open badges and certificates.

Stephen’s vision is that in the future assessment will be based not on what you ‘know’ but on what you ‘do’ – what you do on the public internet. The technology now exists to map a more precise assessment of people through their online interactions. Whilst this raises concerns around issues of privacy and ethical use of data, it also means that people will be more in control of their own assessment. In the future we will have our own personal servers and will personally manage our multiple identities through public and private social networks. Prospective employers seeking a match for the jobs they want filled can then view the details of these identities. There is some evidence that learners are already managing their own online spaces. See for example Jim Groom’s work on A Domain of One’s Own.

Why might new approaches to assessment such as this be necessary? Here are some of the thoughts that Stephen shared with us.

It is harder and harder these days to get a job, despite the fact that employers have job vacancies.  There is a skills gap.  The unemployed don’t have the skills that employers need. We might think that the solution would be to educate people in the needed skills and then employers could hire them, but employers don’t seem to know what skills are needed and although learning skills inventories help people to recognise what they don’t know, these inventories don’t help them to get to what they do know.

Education is crucial for personal and skills development and more education leads to happier people and a more developed society. The problem is that we confuse the outcomes of education with the process of education. We think that we can determine/control learning outcomes and what people learn. See Slide 14

But useful outcomes are undefinable (e.g. understand that …..) and we need an understanding of understanding. Definable outcomes such as ‘recite’ and ‘display’ are simpler but behaviourist (Slide 18).   There is more to knowing than a set of facts that you need to pass the test.  Knowing something is to recognise it, in the sense that you can’t unknow it.  Stephen used ‘Where’s Wally’ as an example of this:

Knowing, according to Stephen, is a physical state – it is the organisation of connections in our brain. Our brain is a pattern recogniser. Knowing is about ‘doing’ rather that some mental state.

My understanding of what Stephen is saying is that if we believe that knowing is about pattern recognition, then achievement will be recognized in how good learners are at pattern recognition as evidenced by what they ‘do’ in their online interactions. ‘Assessors’ will also need to be good at pattern recognition.

Learners are increasingly more sensitive to the patterns they see in the huge amount of data that they interact with on the internet, and machines are getting closer to being able to grade assignments through pattern recognition.  As they interact online learners leave digital traces. Big data is being used to analyse these internet interactions.  This can be used for assessment purposes. But this has, of course, raised concerns about the ethics of big data analysis and the concern for privacy is spreading – as we have recently seen with respect to Facebook’s use of our data. (Slide 55)

A move to personally managed social networks rather than centrally managed social networks will enable learners to control what they want prospective employers to know about them and human networks will act as quality filters.

Stephen’s final word was that assessment of the future will redefine ‘body of work’.

All these are very interesting ideas. I do wonder though whether it’s a massive assumption that all learners will be able to manage their own online identities such that they become employable. What are the skills needed for this? How will people get these skills? Will this be a more equitable process than currently exists, or will it lead to another set of hierarchies and marginalisation of a different group.

Lots to think about – but I really like the move to putting assessment more in the control of learners.

26-09-2014 Postscript

See also this post by Stephen Downes – http://halfanhour.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/beyond-assessment-recognizing.html – which provides all the details of this talk